I didn’t spend my year out before university travelling the world, living in questionable hostels, or narrowly avoiding being arrested in Greece (eldest sister). I gap yeared in the exotic surroundings of Hemel Hempstead, working at WHSmith, then a nursery and various temping jobs. Doesn’t sound too thrilling. But for me, my thrills came once a week with a visit to Hemel Hempstead’s WHSmith (RIP) book department. Up to this point, I didn’t own a huge number of books. I was an avid visitor to the local library, but the decadence of owning the books that I loved was a new high, and one that didn’t need to be found by imbibing ayahuasca and crying in a rainforest. With my weekly pay packet in hand, only one section would do: Penguin Modern Classics. Those turquoise spines were mesmerizing. I wanted to own them for the way they looked as much as the words inside. To say I was obsessed was putting it mildly. The glamour of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the angst of D H Lawrence, the poetry of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the wit of Kingsley Amis. I discovered PMC’s Burmese Days on my boyfriend’s bedside table and stole it for my collection – it’s what I reread when I want to relive the heady days of early romance and hot summer days. Those turquoise spines expanded like a wave across my desk. Collections of mid-20th century writing became my catnip.
Then the Vintage and Virago classics introduced me to incredible female voices, still relevant decades after they were first published. Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Bowen, Patricia Highsmith, Antonia White. The female experience played out time and again, regardless of generation. Voices from the past connecting with women of the present with ferocious intelligence, intense vulnerability, acerbic wit, righteous rage, awe-inspiring strength, high-five one-liners and fuck you attitude.
When I started work on the Mermaid Collection, the female voice and the 20th century was where I started. But alongside this, I wanted to curate a collection that appealed to as wide a readership as possible. As much as I loved all these classics, there was a whiff of the elite about them, and that isn’t what Penguin Michael Joseph is about. As the publishers of incredible Top 10 bestsellers, from Marian Keyes to Jojo Moyes, Sue Townsend to Claire Dougla, Liane Moriarty to Dawn French, authors that aren’t always appreciated for their quality because of their commercial success, I knew there were female writers from the mid-20th century who would have been similar Top 10 bestsellers of their day, if such a thing had existed. Each Mermaid and author has been chosen for their page-turning storytelling, plotting and characterisation. You may not yet have heard of Fay Weldon, Margaret Kennedy, Helen McCloy and Lettice Cooper, but I guarantee they will deliver the kind of reading experience that will have you searching out their backlist and recommending them to your friends.
The forewords have been written by contemporary writers – commercial Top 10 bestsellers themselves – not as pieces of literary criticism but as a genuine response to their reading experience, and a reflection on the author and book’s importance to the world in which it was published and its continued relevance today. And they are beautiful. In the same way that I coveted those gorgeous turquoise spines and displayed them on my desk, readers today proudly curate their bookshelves as an expression of themselves, drawn in an equally balanced way to both beauty and content.
We are so proud to launch the Mermaid Collection on 11th September in Penguin Michael Joseph’s 90th year, with these four titles being the first of many more Mermaids to come (we’ve already signed two more for 2026…). I hope, more than anything, that the Mermaid Collection will inspire readers, as I was, to seek out these authors that have been under celebrated for too long and get as much joy as I did from the sheer delight of owning them.
Be a mermaid. Make waves.
Very best wishes,
Elizabeth Smith
Comms Director & Associate Publisher
Penguin Michael Joseph
The Mermaid Collection
